It

Fiction: It by Stephen King Non-Fiction: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre. It's about the KGB spy-turned-MI6 agent Oleg Gordievsky and reads like a thriller.

I would argue that Stephen King's 'It' should also have the status of a great novel. One French critic wrote of 'It': «Ça» fonctionne parce que «Ça» fait peur. Pendant plus de mille pages – Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, L'Express Translation: 'It' works because "It" scares. Throughout over one thousand pages. How wrong can a critic be? Yes the horror element is great but it's not why 'It' works at all, not for me anyway. For me 'It' works because of its insights into human nature – it's use of fantasy to look unflinchingly at human nature at it's worst and it's most beautiful, to do justice to a world that is full of both evil and goodness, because every story overlaps with other stories overlapping with other stories, just like real life, because it's a morally uncompromising book which presents no hard and fast rules of morality, because it portrays children and childhood accurately, because it shows us a world where abuse, neglect and apathy are rife, come in many forms, and can be perpetrated by people for all kinds of reasons, sometimes wilfully, sometimes from neediness, sometimes from a self-deluded sense of righteousness, sometimes from lack of knowing anything better. Because it…